Let’s start with a rundown of your cycling background. How long have you been riding bikes? Is there a particular type of riding you enjoy more? i.e. road, gravel, mountain.

LM: I learnt to ride first from friends back in grade 4, then I forgot, then I learnt again from my dad in grade 5. But my personal tradition of the little trip which then evolved into the voyages began in 2014, in my freshman year at UCLA, when my parents encouraged me to buy a bike to explore LA. I bought a second-hand commuter bike, a retired rental Bruin Bike, and rode it around LA, mostly Westside, South Bay, and Malibu. I got addicted. I almost joined the UCLA cycling team, but I didn't because I felt bad about using my parents' money to buy a racing bike, plus it's the adventure rather than competition that keeps me riding. Then I double majored and no longer had the time to ride, so the bike ended up stolen as it was largely abandoned. In 2020, I moved out of Caltech graduate student housing and needed a bike to commute and get groceries. Actually, I thought about getting a car but didn't when I considered the cost. I bought my commuter bike "Enterprise" from Target and revived the little trip tradition in May 2021 to help improve my sleep. I got even more addicted and upgraded to my road bike "Voyager" in September 2021. More recently, with my gravel bike "Wayfarer", I got more serious in gravel though I have been riding some gravel on "Voyager" before, so I can boldly go more places I have never gone before. So I ride for transport, and for road and gravel adventures. However, overall I enjoy road the most.

It's my understanding your bike is your main source of transportation, how many miles do you ride per week? Do you have any advice for someone who wants to ditch their car and bike full-time?

LM: When not touring, anywhere from 80-something to 200-something miles, depending on the amount of work I have to do. Many of my colleagues know that car culture is bad for the environment but can't ditch driving, because they don't feel safe biking around Pasadena and LA in general.

I think the number one piece of advice for new riders is to find out the side roads and bike lanes where you feel safer to ride outside the sidewalk or gutter and learn skills riding in traffic and safety in numbers if a group commute is feasible. For those who primarily ride for recreation, here's number two: if you ditch your car, then you need to think about your bike differently, as you need to carry stuff with it and lock it up. Number 3 is to find out the interesting local hidden gems reachable by bike; adventure doesn't have to be far and this can greatly cut transportation cost and emission from flying and driving for vacation. Maybe number 4 is remember transit, which in LA is not great but not too bad either; you can take your bike on the trains and buses, but this is ableist and doesn't work for adaptive bikes such as recumbent bikes, tandems, and trikes. Number 5, for new riders, with LA urban sprawl, either improve fitness or ride an e-bike to ride further when necessary. However, this reveals my privileges in that I'm not targeted by the police who much more likely stop Black and Latino people not wearing Lycra, and I don't live in a high-crime area.

Finally, don't be fooled that replacing car with bike necessarily means that you are an environmental champion, because the cycling industry isn't exactly good for the environment either though it isn't as bad as the car industry; I strongly recommend this article.

What is your longest ride in a 24-hour span?

LM: 122-something miles, from last year's Summer of Love, when I rode all the way from Pasadena to Santa Barbara, with a detour to Ojai. The limit is actually not physical endurance, but that I want to spend time taking photos and absorbing the view.

Do you have a favorite route?

LM: That's a difficult question since there are so many awesome places. I put places I like and dislike (usually for safety reasons) on this map. If you force me to narrow down, these are my LA County favorites in each category and they shouldn't be too bike unfriendly: Wilderness: the 39, all the way from Azusa to Islip Saddle. Urban: 7th St from DTLA to MacArthur Park. Suburban: Maybe Glen Oaks in Pasadena. Near the ocean: Palos Verdes Dr E.

Congratulations on recently defending your thesis! Tell us about your field, how did you get interested in your field, and what are your plans post-doc?

LM: Thanks! I actually mentioned PAA and "Voyager" in the Acknowledgement section of my thesis, because I think about spatial phenomena while riding. I work in spatial transcriptomics, in which we map the spatial locations where each gene in the genome is expressed in a piece of tissue on a microscope slide. I got interested when I got into histology and microscopy back in undergrad. The first thing I learnt when I began working in a lab was hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining, the purplish stain some may have seen from a medical article or a hospital and the most common histological stain for tissue morphology. I also learnt special stains specific to collagen and iron to locate them in the tissue. Spatial transcriptomics is really glorified histology, where we stain for thousands of things instead of one or two as in traditional histology. Also, I have long been interested in geography though I got into biology instead in part because my high school geography class was nothing but regurgitating the textbook while the biology class was more interesting; I'm applying data analysis methods from geography to spatial transcriptomics data. I'm staying another year in the same lab as a postdoc to finish up the project. I don't know what's next yet.

You like to ride and camp along the way. Can you tell us your favorite camping spot?

LM: Honestly, I don't do this all that often. These are my favorites thus far: Table Mountain in Wrightwood where you can see the Milky Way not so far from LA, and Ipsut Creek in Mt. Rainier National Park (backcountry), next to the White River.

What is your favorite part of PAA?

LM: The nice and interesting people I met, especially the older members who show that there's no such thing as being too old to do really impressive rides. At least in LA, bike people tend to be cool.

Rapid Fire:

Sunrise / Sunset

Pack / Solo

Fame / Glory

Grit / Talent

Inner Tube / Tubeless

Race / Ride

Distance / Time

Low Socks / Tall Socks Neutral

Electric / Mechanical

Instagram / Strava

Flat / Climbing

Experiences / Results

Disc / Rim

Indoor Trainer / Outdoor

Food / Fuel

Passion / Watts

Experiences / Results

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